For any teenager seeking an identity in the early 1970s, David Bowie was a daring role model – a performer whose voice was unmistakably masculine but whose appearance blurred the gender gap.

The albums Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups and others were in everyone’s dog-eared vinyl collection and Bowie’s face was on every one.

It was a fragile-looking face, either ghostly white or – as in the case of Aladdin Sane, a 1973 ‘comeback’ album – vividly made-up.

He could look like a boy or a girl and place himself in any era. He broke the mould with style and confidence and he aged gracefully – not like the old rockers who, paunchy and balding, strive to recapture past glories.

In my boys’ school when the punks and goths were still some way over the horizon, Bowie was always one to watch.

He was the reason some of my more colourful classmates daringly experimented with a dash of eyeshadow to go with the modishly over-the-collar hair.

What they couldn’t emulate were his eyes, each a different colour as the result – it was said – of a playground squabble over a girl when a ring on his opponent’s finger caught him.

Looking a bit like Bowie played well with the girls but many of them were also trying to look a bit like Bowie, causing confusion under the glitterball.

Bowie was never, in my memory, a divisive influence. Those who might have disapproved of the look could appreciate songs that were clearly original and beautifully crafted.

You heard them everywhere – discos, parties, record shops and on the radio.

There seemed to be a Bowie song for every occasion and I can’t, off the top of my head, think of one, not even The Gene Jeanie, that ever grated despite endless repetition.

There is a sense that any one of his albums, released today, would be hailed as groundbreaking.

While evidently not blind to fashion – Fashion, from the Scary Monsters album, is enduringly cool – Bowie, almost by definition, was a leader rather than a follower.

If the image was good, it was matched by a voice that could slip effortlessly into any mode. He could be the rocker or the crooner and could even, on occasion, sound operatic.

I was interested to hear on the radio that as a youngster he strove to emulate Anthony Newley, an actor, singer and songwriter who was chat show fodder in the 1970s for his achievements in the West End and on Broadway.

Like Newley, Bowie had a sense of the theatrical. Just look at Ziggy Stardust, the alter ego who rose and fell and finally ‘died’ on stage in 1973 when his creator decided he had had enough.

Bowie’s impact can be judged by the number of yellowing clippings in the archive of The Journal and Chronicle.

These stories capture the excitement of a Bowie tour and the euphoria which inevitably went with the chance to see the man in the flesh – before he finally withdrew from public gaze to concentrate on the later albums whose release invariably had the aura of a major event.

Bowie’s concert at Newcastle City Hall in June 1973 generated a lot of pre-publicity, as you might imagine.

There was a fear it might not happen. First a city counciller, Mrs Freda Rosner, suggested it might not be good for the young people who would pack the 2,000-seat venue. She promised to “read up” on Bowie but said she was sure he wouldn’t be as good as Gracie Fields.

Then the City Hall manager was poised to cancel the concert because it appeared Bowie was to perform in Leeds on the same night, making up for his refusal to play there on an earlier occasion because the stage was too small.

Tour operator Mel Bush later said there had been “a king-sized clanger”. The concert was back on again.

Hundreds of fans packed the street outside the venue on the night and inside the atmosphere evidently reached fever pitch before Bowie entered to the soundtrack from controversial film A Clockwork Orange.

As fans clambered towards the stage to get close to their idol, several rows of seats collapsed and the St John Ambulance Brigade moved in to treat people for minor injuries.

But the headline on the piece focused on the positive: “Bowie wows the fans.”